Why Do High‐Income Democrats Support Redistribution? The Roles of Partisanship, Racial Attitudes and Fiscal Populism

Since the 1990s, high-income individuals have increasingly sorted into the Democratic Party as a result of their socially liberal views. There is evidence that over time high-income Democrats have also liberalized in their economic attitudes, but the motivations behind this purported support remain unclear. This study uses a forced-choice conjoint experiment with an oversample of high-income respondents and takes the novel approach of pairing the experiment with cognitive interviews in order to explore why high-income Democrats support redistributive policies. Results show that the redistributive preferences of high-income Democrats look very similar to those of other Democrats. They prefer policies proposed by their own party. They want policies that are racially "fair," and sometimes define this to mean favoring Black recipients. Most of all, however, they are driven by a commitment to "fiscal populism," the idea that (increased) government spending should be funded by the most elite members of society.